I picked up a copy of the re-issue of The Armageddon Rag in the dealer's room at Boskone, mostly because Emmet O'Brien raves about it. This is, of course, a little dicey, because Emmet's a weird guy sometimes, but the premise looked fairly interesting.
The book follows washed-up author Sander Blair, founder and former editor of a counterculture newspaper turned major music magazine, who gets asked to write a story about the gruesome murder of a former rock promoter. The promoter in question was a real sonofabitch, but nobody deserves to be tied to a desk and have their heart ripped out, and there are hints that the murder is connected to one of his former bands, the Nazgul, who were the Biggest Band in the World until their charismatic lead singer was murdered in the middle of a concert in 1971.
Blair's life is in shambles anyway, so he sets off to interview the surviving Nazgul, and also reconnect with his own past. Along the way, he discovers that a sinister West Coast promoter has been planning to re-unite the Nazgul, and his goals seem to be a little more mystical than just making a mint selling black concert T-shirts.
There's some nice atmospheric stuff here, but the book runs into two major problems. The first is common to all novels dealing with music-- if you're going to depict the Greatest Band in the World, you need to say something about the songs, which requires you to write the songs for the Greatest Band in the World, and if you could do that, why would you be writing a novel?
The bigger problem, though, is that the book is full of badly dated self-congratulatory Baby Boomer horseshit.
OK, that's a little harsh, but I'm in something of a Mood at the moment, and it's an accurate reflection of my reaction to the book. I don't know that there's any mood when I wouldn't be annoyed by this, though.
The book was first published in 1983, and as a result the bits where Sander reconnects with his old college friends are consumed with the question of "selling out"-- it's the gung-ho Eighties, and the whole Woodstock generation is in the process of becoming Yuppiefied. Sander's living with a Realtor(tm), and the most revolutionary of his old circle of friends has become a hyper-obnoxious ad man in Chicago, and there's a big scene where he and Sander yell at each other.
This was a big deal in 1983, and I'm old enough to remember the media obsession with the whole phenomenon, but at this point, we've had twenty years to get used to the "loss of innocence" of the Baby Boom. And, really, it was pretty played out by, oh, 1986.
The other scenes with Sander's old friends are similarly ham-handed, but not quite as annoying. Whether it's the hippie chick living on a commune, though, or the disillusioned college professor complaining that kids these days just don't care enough, every step into the past is full of the idea that the 60's were great and wonderful, and the Baby Boom generation was awesome and special, and nothing is as good as it was in the 60's. The whole Nazgul plot revolves around this as well-- that the music of the 60's was wonderful and transformative and had the power to change the world, while the music of the early 1980's is just disposable pop.
I'm really pretty much fed up with this whole line of crap, having heard it in one form or another for, oh, my entire music-listening life. It's a total crock, of course-- as Exhibit A, let me present the Top 20 Songs of 1971, which is the year Martin sets as the point where the Sixties fell apart. Are those songs really that much deeper than the 1983 list? I don't think so.
Anyway, the fact that the premise kind of gets up my nose sort of magnifies the other flaws in the book. Martin has a bit of a tin ear for dialogue at the best of times, and the song lyrics quoted just don't work for me. The characters are all really broad archetypes more than anything else, and the stark contrast between the good and noble people clinging to hippie ideals and the craven schemers who are beholden to the materialistic world is so overdone that it feels a little like a countercultural Left Behind. And I'm really trying to blot out the whole subplot with the super-hippie friend who's a virtual prisoner of his right-wing father, which is just stupid.
So, basically, I didn't like this very much, is what I'm saying. If I had read it in the 80's, I might feel differently, but at this point, my tolerance for 60's nostalgia is so low that it really never stood a chance.
Venting about it is kind of cathartic, though...
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The whole nostalgia for the 60s thing is a creation of the media and a few self-obsessed narcissists who think their navel lint is fascinating. And I grew up in the 60s.
Just to play Nazgul's Advocate here...
George R. R. Martin is NOT preaching the 60s any more than Heinlein preached Fascism in Starship Troopers. What he's doing is building a Dark Fantasy around the notion that the New Age values of the 60s were truer than hippies knew. This, it does well.
It does well the exploration of the dark side of the subculture. Less about Woodstock than Altamont. Less about the floating Grateful Dead fans than about dangers therein.
It does well the shifting viewpoints building to a dramatic climax. This GRR perfected in his current award-winning bestsellers.
GRR is not an illogical man. Quite the contrary, he his a systematic thinker, as evidenced by his serious foray into the Chess world back when he was Ben Nethercot's roommate at college.
GRR takes a set of assumptions and sees how far he can take them. Which, in this novel, is quite far indeed.
I'd love to see this as a movie. Ideally, it would run as a double feature with This is Spinal Tap [1984].
I remember reading this when it came out and thinking it very good. Not brilliant, but very good. However, I have never been tempted to reread it, and that's because even when it came out it was a bit ... chronospecific if I may coin a word.
Oh my God, I read that book. It was a book I randomly picked up at the library years ago. I had forgotten the title and author.